Coach’s ouster created schism in Stanford softball program

1of 3Former Stanford coach John Rittman guided Stanford to 16 consecutive NCAA tournaments, but was let go after the 2014 season. He is now the associate head coach at Kansas.Photo: Stanford University

2of 3Coach Rachel Hanson saw her Stanford team struggle to a 17-37 record and a last-place finish in the Pac-12 this year.Photo: Stanford University

3of 3LSU's Carley Hoover pitches in the second inning during an NCAA Women's College World Series softball game against Michigan in Oklahoma City, Sunday, May 31, 2015. Michigan won 6-3 and moves onto the championship series. (AP Photo/Alonzo Adams)Photo: Alonzo Adams, Associated Press

Stanford’s softball team recently completed the program’s worst season in 30 years. Though the Cardinal returned all nine starters from a team that narrowly missed the postseason a year earlier, they were sorely hampered by injuries to key pitchers and went 17-37.

They finished last in the Pac-12 with a 2-22 record, and 15 of those losses were cut short by the eight-run “mercy” rule.

On and off the field, the Cardinal vividly demonstrated the wisdom of Lincoln’s dictum: A house divided against itself cannot stand. Their plight underscores the intensity of high-level college softball and how things can go horribly wrong even for a team in one of the nation’s most successful athletic departments.

How divided were the Cardinal? First-year head coach Rachel Hanson found herself in “a poisonous environment — kids who hated each other,” according to Dr. Bill Ashby, father of infielder Erin Ashby. “There was a lot of animosity.”

Essentially, he said, the team broke into two camps: players who had supported former head coach John Rittman and those who had pushed — successfully — for his dismissal.

“The girls who liked John felt they were betrayed by the other girls,” he said.

Under Rittman, Stanford reached postseason play 16 straight times. Had things gone according to plan, the Cardinal would have been shooting for a 17th such trip in 2014 with the help of heralded freshman pitcher Carley Hoover.

Instead, Hoover — the nation’s top recruit in 2013 — was limited to five appearances by a stress fracture in a rib before being shelved for the season. Stanford finished eighth in the Pac-12 and failed to reach the postseason.

Since then, things have gotten much worse.

Rittman did return to the postseason this year, but as the associate head coach at Kansas.

Hoover did pitch in the Women’s College World Series in Oklahoma City, but for LSU.

Rittman was ousted by Stanford after the 2014 season, as were two assistant coaches and a trainer. Partly as a result, Hoover transferred. How it all unfolded is subject to dispute, but some things are clear.

Meeting with AD

Two days after the 2014 season ended, 15 people — five active players (two of them starters), five former players and five parents — met with athletic director Bernard Muir. In a four-hour meeting that became emotional at times, they aired an array of grievances against Rittman and his staff that centered mainly on their perceived favoritism toward some players. Ex-player Tegan Schmidt called the softball program “a breeding ground for negativity.”

In a transcript of the meeting obtained by The Chronicle, former shortstop Jenna Rich, the school’s career leader in RBIs, said she went through “misery and agony”” as a result of criticism by the coaching staff. “It makes me sick to my stomach to think anyone could go through the same thing,” she said.

Rittman did not return messages requesting comment and Muir declined to comment, according to a university spokeswoman.

Hanson was not made available for comment to discuss the season, according to an athletic-department spokesman.

Judging from the transcript, the meeting was long on opinions critical of Rittman, his staff and the medical treatment some players received, but short on examples of the coach’s shortcomings. There was vague talk of coaches bad-mouthing players, urging players to change class schedules for practice needs and overworking pitchers. Players described feelings of depression and disputes with coaches over financial aid. At times, the discussion bordered on the trivial: Rich and others said the coaches made a point of greeting some parents at games and ignoring others.

One unidentified player was said to have come to a game “drunk or hung over” but didn’t receive punishment or help. Third baseman Hanna Winter, however, told The Chronicle that the player was neither drunk nor hung over, but the coaches spent a lot of time talking to her about drinking, and she apologized to the team for arriving with alcohol on her breath.

Most of the players and parents interviewed for this story said most of the grievances were untrue, exaggerated or taken out of context.

Three weeks after the meeting, the school announced Rittman’s resignation in a three-sentence release. His departure was widely considered a firing, and a subsequent statement by a school official made it all but official. The release mentioned his 18 years and his work as an assistant coach with the U.S. national team, including Olympic gold and silver medals it won. It didn’t mention that he was one of the most successful college coaches in the country — he led Stanford to two World Series, compiled a 750-351-3 record and produced 15 All-Americans.

Mixed feelings

Many of the players not at the meeting were shocked by his ouster. Their parents were appalled, but they held their tongues because, as Dr. Ashby and others said, they didn’t want their daughters to face retribution if the parents publicly criticized the university. Sixteen of them finally signed an April 9 letter to Stanford President John Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy blasting Muir for a superficial investigation that resulted in Rittman’s “forced resignation.”

The letter charged that Muir “allowed a small group of well-organized disgruntled parents, angry about the lack of playing time for their daughters, to take control of the leadership of the team.”

Bettina Winter, Hanna’s mother, told The Chronicle that Muir “handled this very poorly. In my opinion, somebody who reaches that level in an administration should be a lot more diligent in investigations of accusations people make against other people.”

Skip Sorenson, the father of designated player/pitcher Kylie Sorenson, said Muir should be fired. “It was completely inappropriate what he did,” he said. “From all the information I’ve heard, it seemed like a witch hunt. ... There was only one side of the story that was listened to.”

Muir “needs to be held accountable for the way it was handled,” Dr. Ashby said. “John deserved better for his years of service. They threw him out like yesterday’s news.”

During the meeting with the disgruntled group, Muir asked how many active players were not in attendance. According to the transcript, Schmidt said, “There are only five that did not support this (group) here.” However, the parents who wrote the angry letter in April represented nine of the 2014 players. Some of the pro-Rittman parents and players said they didn’t know about the meeting; others said they weren’t invited.

Support for Rittman

Some of those who signed the letter said that when they found out about the meeting, they tried to reach Muir in order to defend Rittman, but didn’t get a call back.

One of them was Bettina Winter. She said it was a shame that Rittman was ousted from his dream job. “He used to say he had to pinch himself because he had such terrific kids to work with,” Winter said. When he left, “he was very upset. They gave him and his family 30 days to get out of university housing. It was nasty.”

There were also allegations at the May 12 meeting concerning trainer Brandon Marcello. A subsequent investigation by Stanford’s Title IX coordinator concluded that Marcello created a “sexually hostile work environment.” Marcello was fired, but Rittman was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Marcello did not return messages requesting comment.

The university found that Rittman conducted practices slightly beyond the NCAA limit of 20 hours a week, several players and parents said. As a result, the team reportedly was limited to 17.5 hours a week for most of this season, although neither the NCAA nor Stanford would confirm the sanction.

Similar to Muir, Hennessy and Etchemendy declined to comment, according to a university spokeswoman said. She provided a copy of the response Jeff Wachtel, Hennessy’s chief of staff, gave the 16 parents who sent the letter.

Wachtel said in his response that the school is “required by law to treat personnel matters as confidential.” He said the school “conducted a thorough investigation and our best judgment was to make changes in the coaching staff.” There was nothing in his note to indicate that Rittman left of his own accord.

Alissa Haber, an All-America outfielder at Stanford who played for the U.S. national team in the 2010 world championships, strongly defended Rittman. “I have talked to dozens of former players and they are all shocked,” she told the Palo Alto Daily News. “No one saw it coming. The consensus is that we all love him. He was like a father to us.”

Who’s to blame?

Many of the players and parents who supported the coach were convinced the main driver against him was LaShawn Wells, a former travel team coach in Concord and the father of outfielder Tylyn Wells. But his daughter told a meeting of the team's veterans and coaches in February that it was Oregon head coach Mike White who asked her father to get the ball rolling.

White, whose daughter, Nyree, left the Stanford team for personal reasons in 2014, apparently didn't think it would look right to be seen as helping force another Pac-12 coach out, the pro-Rittman parents said. He was believed to be upset over Nyree's unhappy experience at Stanford. White, whose team played in the College World Series, declined to comment.

Wells denies organizing the meeting or that White had any role in it. Hanna Winter said she and fellow senior starters Cassandra Roulund and Leah White (no relation) were convinced White was “one of the big players” in the campaign to get rid of Rittman. They declined to high-five him in the customary team ritual after his Ducks won 5-4 at Stanford on April 18.

“We wouldn’t have felt comfortable high-fiving any of the people at the meeting,” Winter said.

Hanson benched the three for the next game.

“I understand she had to punish us for that,” said Winter, whose benching marked the first time she’d missed a game in her four years at Stanford. “But I don’t think the punishment fit the crime.”

The three then quit the team with 10 games left, deciding that being benched was the tipping point in a rancorous season.

“We felt we were treated like criminals, as if we were trying to defy (Hanson). That wasn’t true,” Winter said.

Quitting was “one of the hardest decisions of my life,” she said. “I was leaving a sport I had played for 14 years. But the next day, I felt a lot better. I didn’t have to go out there with people who wanted to stab me in the back.”

Confidence in Hanson’s ability to right the ship is low among the remaining players “because of her lack of experience,” Winter said. Citing the loss of such prospects as Kelly Barnhill, the nation’s top pitching recruit, who picked Florida over Stanford in October, Winter said, “It will be a long time before Stanford softball is strong again. I’d tell recruits, ‘If you come here for school, it’s great, but if you come for softball, take a hard look and see if this is what you really want.’”

Tom FitzGerald has been the Stanford beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle since 2009 and has gone to a bowl game every year with the Cardinal football team. He also covers men’s and women’s basketball and many other Stanford sports.

He also covers motor sports in the Bay Area and wrote about the America's Cup regatta in San Francisco in 2013, during which Oracle Team USA made one of the greatest comebacks in sports history to beat Emirates Team New Zealand.

Among the many momentous games he has covered were the 49ers' victory over Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, which featured "The Catch'' by Dwight Clark, and the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Olympic upset of the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y. At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, he rode the bobsled run with members of the U.S. team for a first-person story. He also rode on Russell Coutts’ Oracle Team USA catamaran in 2012 and in an Indy car with legendary Mario Andretti in 2014 for other first-person stories.

For 15 years he wrote a popular sports humor column called "Top of the Sixth" (later re-titled "Open Season"). A weekly version of the column was nationally syndicated in as many as 50 daily newspapers.

He has a degree in political science from the University of Massachusetts. He lives in Benicia.